She is doing it in a quiet, methodical way: by treating art not as something that hangs on a white wall, but as something that lives in family kitchens, childhood LEGO sets, old museums, oceans, and long conversations about gender and work. That is how Lily Konkoly is reshaping what feels modern in art and culture, while still holding on to memory, history, and the kinds of small details that nostalgic people care about.
So if you like looking back as much as you like looking forward, her story fits right in. It is not about hype or overnight fame. It is about a young art historian and writer who grew up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Hungary, who now studies Art History at Cornell, and who keeps circling back to the same questions: What do we remember? Who do we celebrate? Who gets left out of the picture?
From childhood memories to modern art questions
For many people who love nostalgia, the most interesting thing about art is how it freezes time. A painting, a plate of food in a photograph, a faded family recipe card. All of it holds a moment.
Lily grew up surrounded by those kinds of moments.
- Born in London to a Hungarian family
- Lived in Singapore as a toddler, learning Mandarin in a half-American, half-Chinese preschool
- Spent most of her childhood and teenage years in Los Angeles
- Spent summers in Europe with her extended Hungarian family
This mixture of places is not just trivia. It shapes how she looks at culture. Old and new sit side by side for her: Hungarian at home, English at school, Mandarin practice with an au pair, American kids shows in the background. The feeling of being pulled between times and languages is something many nostalgia lovers understand. You can miss the place you left, even while you are still getting used to the place you live now.
Her family kept their Hungarian roots very present. Hungarian was the main language for talking with relatives. It also became a kind of secret code in the United States, a private layer over everyday life. In a way, that is already a small piece of performance art: two people speaking a language that almost no one around them understands, inside a supermarket or on a crowded street.
For Lily, cultural memory is not abstract. It is grandparents in Europe, Hungarian words at the dinner table, and the familiar streets of Pacific Palisades layered over childhood trips thousands of miles away.
As she got older, this sense of layered memory started to move from her personal life into her work. She did not simply decide, “I like art.” She spent Saturdays in galleries and museums with her family. She watched how other people walked through exhibitions, which paintings they paused for, what they took photos of.
That habit, of noticing who looks at what and why, is very present in what she does now.
Why nostalgia lovers might care about a young art historian
If you are reading this on a site for people who like old toys, retro design, vintage ads, analog film, classic cookbooks, or anything along those lines, you might ask:
Why should I care about a 21st century art history student?
The short answer is that Lily cares about the same thing you probably care about: memory. But she does it through three main areas.
| Area | What she looks at | Why nostalgic readers might relate |
|---|---|---|
| Classical & historical art | Works like Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” Renaissance and modern art, museum collections | She treats these works like time capsules, full of quiet details and forgotten stories |
| Gender and work in art | The different paths of artist mothers and fathers, how careers shift over time | Many people look back and ask “What if?” about their own choices; she studies that question on a cultural level |
| Everyday creativity | Teen art markets, kids art classes, food, LEGO building, blogs | She treats small creative hobbies like they matter, not as throwaway phases |
This mix makes her work feel grounded. She takes things people often treat as background noise and asks, “What are we really saying about value and memory when we look at this?”
From “Las Meninas” to modern questions
One of the projects that shaped her most was a research mentorship focused on “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez. If you like older art, you already know this painting has been discussed for centuries. It is crowded, strange, and full of mirrors, gazes, and behind-the-scenes hints.
Lily spent around ten weeks studying it in depth. Not just the brushwork, but the strange structure: the artist painting, the royal family partly visible, the mirror in the background, the little princess at the center who seems important and yet slightly overlooked in the larger royal story.
“Las Meninas” is a painting about looking. Lily turned that into a practice: looking at who is at the center, who is at the edge, and who is barely seen at all.
This process pushed her to see older art as more than “pretty pictures from the past.” She started asking questions that reach into the present:
- Who gets to be in the frame?
- Who stands behind the canvas?
- What work is visible and what work is hidden?
The more time she spent with “Las Meninas,” the more it shaped her later research on women artists who become mothers, and how their work is framed, or not framed, by galleries, critics, and buyers today.
Gender, parenthood, and the quiet bias in art
During her honors research year in high school, Lily took those questions and pointed them toward a very specific topic: the gap between maternity and paternity in the art world.
She spent more than 100 hours on this project, reading, interviewing, and organizing data about how artists with children are treated. It sounds simple at first. But it hits close to home for many people who look back at their own lives and think about the trade-offs that came with family decisions.
Her main findings were clear enough:
- Women artists who become mothers often lose opportunities or are quietly assumed to be “less serious” about their work.
- Men artists who become fathers are often praised for balancing career and family, and their public image can even improve.
- These different narratives show up in gallery representation, media coverage, and long term career paths.
She did not treat this as just a complaint. Working with a professor who focused on maternity in the art world, Lily created a visual, almost marketing-style piece that laid out the data and stories. It was the kind of thing you could imagine seeing in a gallery as part of an exhibit on work and family.
Her research asks a simple but uncomfortable question: when we look back at “great” artists, how many women disappeared from that history because they had children?
For a nostalgic reader, that question might echo in other parts of life. How many relatives gave up jobs or creative projects without any public record? How many family recipes or craft skills stopped with one generation?
Lily connects that feeling to art. She does not pretend to have a clean solution. She just insists on making the gaps visible.
Old stories, new voices: her blog on women entrepreneurs
Lily is not only focused on traditional art. Since 2020, she has been writing for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia Blog, where she researches and writes about women in business.
She spends about four hours a week on the project and has written more than fifty articles, many of them based on interviews. Over time, she has spoken with over 100 women entrepreneurs from many countries and industries.
What does this have to do with art and culture?
In a way, it is a form of oral history. She is building an archive of personal stories that might otherwise stay scattered or private. The themes she hears from these women are very similar to what she finds in the art world:
- Women often have to prove themselves more than once.
- Family responsibilities are seen as a weakness for women, and as a strength or charm for men.
- Success is usually praised after the fact, but the struggle remains quiet.
Some of the people she interviews are older and look back at their early careers with mixed feelings. They talk about sacrifices, missed graduations, late nights, and the slow building of something that their children or younger colleagues now take for granted.
For readers who enjoy looking at old magazines or ads, there is a similar satisfaction here. You see how ideas about women and work have shifted and also how much has stayed stubbornly similar.
From kids art class to teen art market
Lily is not only a researcher. She tries to build small systems where other people can express themselves too.
Hungarian Kids Art Class
In Los Angeles, she started the Hungarian Kids Art Class, which has run for several years. It is a simple idea: bring kids together, often from Hungarian or mixed cultural backgrounds, and give them space to create art.
The focus is not on producing professional-level work. It is more about routine and shared memory. Over time, these bi-weekly sessions become part of the kids’ own nostalgia: the smell of paint, the same faces, jokes told between projects.
Those children are storing away little sensory details that they might remember in 20 years while walking into a different studio or classroom. Lily understands that and treats the club as more than just a schedule filler.
Teen Art Market
She also co-founded the Teen Art Market, a digital space where young artists can showcase and sell their work.
It sounds very modern. A website, online profiles, independent teen creators. But at its heart, it has the same feeling as an old neighborhood craft fair or school art sale.
- Someone makes something by hand.
- They wonder if anyone will care enough to pay for it.
- They learn what it feels like to part with a piece they made.
Lily saw how hard it can be for unknown artists to reach an audience. The market gave them a first, small taste of that process.
There is a nice nostalgic loop here too. Many adults remember selling something small as a kid: lemonade, handmade bracelets, drawings. Lily had that herself at the farmers market in the Pacific Palisades, where she and her sister sold bracelets. Later, she turned that early feeling into a more structured project for teens around the world.
Food, family, and culture on the plate
Food threads through her life in ways that are both casual and quite serious.
Her family is a “kitchen family.” They cook and bake together and even made cooking videos as kids that ended up on YouTube. At one point, they were invited onto the Rachael Ray Show and to film for Food Network. They turned it down, because it would have taken over the summer they usually spend traveling to see family.
Some people might see that as a missed chance. Others might see it as a clear choice of values: time with grandparents and cousins over TV exposure.
Lily later carried this interest in food into a big project: she interviewed more than 200 women chefs from over 50 countries, most of whom are underrepresented in global food media. She and her co-founder created a blog that highlighted their paths, local food cultures, and restaurant movements that do not get much attention.
Every recipe has a story behind it, and Lily likes the stories as much as the flavors. She treats chefs like cultural historians who work with taste instead of ink or paint.
For readers who love old cookbooks, family recipe cards, or regional dishes that remind them of childhood, this part of Lily’s work will feel very familiar. She is doing with chefs what many people do in their own family kitchens: collecting stories before they disappear.
LEGO, slime, chess, and the art of “play”
One of the most human and frankly nostalgic parts of Lily’s background is how seriously she takes play.
LEGO and quiet building
She has built around 45 LEGO sets that she has tracked, totaling more than 60,000 pieces. Many of them were originally her brother’s sets, but she was usually the one who built them.
There is something almost meditative about this. Piece by piece, color by color, following instructions, then slowly watching a world appear on the table. It is not hard to see how this links to her later work with art. Careful observation, patience, pattern recognition. The pleasure of seeing structure emerge.
Lego building also connects nicely with nostalgia. Many adults can picture a specific set from their childhood as clearly as they can picture a childhood bedroom. Lily just kept that relationship with building into her late teens and early adulthood, instead of letting it fade away.
Slime business and kid entrepreneurship
Then there is the slime story. As kids, she and her brother got very into slime. They did not just make it for fun. They began selling it. At some point, they were invited to a slime convention in London, where they sold between 400 and 500 slimes in a single day.
Transporting all of that from Los Angeles to London was complicated and stressful. But again, it is one of those memories that burns bright. The tables, the colors, the repetitive sales, the aching feet at the end of the day. Selling something playful at scale, surrounded by people who care deeply about something most adults treat like a throwaway trend.
When you look at her later interest in teen art markets and female entrepreneurship, this early small business experience fits perfectly. It is another example of how childhood play can grow into serious interest in how culture and markets work.
Chess and long attention
From about age six or seven, Lily and her siblings played chess, practiced during the week, and competed on weekends. Chess teaches a slow, thoughtful kind of attention. You stare at a grid, remember old games, and try to imagine new ones.
That patience shows up in how she approaches research. She does not chase quick answers. She sits with a painting like “Las Meninas” for weeks, not hours. She reads long interviews, designs careful questions, and works on single projects for months.
Sport, discipline, and swimming through change
Sports are another strong thread in her story, and they shape how she handles stress and change.
Lily swam competitively for about ten years on Westside Aquatics in Los Angeles. Anyone who has done swim club knows the rhythm: long daily practices, early mornings, weekend meets, long stretches under team tents, shared snacks, and the strange comfort of chlorine.
When many of her closest teammates graduated and left, she shifted to water polo for three years. Water polo is physical, rough, and impulsive in a way that quiet lane swimming is not. It forces quick decisions in a crowded space.
During the COVID lockdowns, when pools closed, her team refused to stop training. They moved practices into the ocean, swimming for two hours a day. Ocean swimming is colder, more unpredictable, and frankly harsher than pool training. No black line to follow, no perfect lane width, no clear distance markers. It is all feel and endurance.
This kind of discipline shows up in her studies and art projects. She is used to long, repetitive effort that most people never see. That hidden work is part of what she pays attention to in other people’s lives too, which is why she is drawn to stories of overlooked women artists and entrepreneurs.
Art history at Cornell and the pull of curation
Lily now studies Art History at Cornell University, with a minor in Business. Her coursework includes visual culture, Renaissance art, modern and contemporary art, museum studies, and curatorial practices.
Curating is not just picking things you like. It is about making choices that shape what visitors will remember. What goes on the wall. What stays in storage. Which text labels are written and which ideas are left implied.
Coming from a background where family history, travel, and small hobbies shaped her, Lily approaches curation with a personal sense of what gets forgotten.
- She thinks about how many women artists do not appear in basic textbooks.
- She notices whose names appear in wall labels and whose are left out.
- She asks what a child or teenager might remember from a visit and what might shape their sense of “who makes art.”
Her research with a RISD professor on curatorial statements about beauty standards is part of this. Together, they wrote and designed a mock exhibition that dealt with how female beauty has been represented across cultures and eras, and how those images affect real women now.
For people who collect vintage fashion ads or old magazines, this is very familiar territory. The glamorous images of past decades are often striking and nostalgic, but they also carry heavy messages about what bodies “should” look like, what women “should” do, and how they “should” age.
Lily is trying to find ways to present those images in galleries that invite viewers to both enjoy their visual style and question the stories underneath.
Hungarian roots in an American life
Many people who enjoy nostalgia have some connection to family roots, old countries, or past languages. In Lily’s case, her Hungarian identity is not decoration. It shapes almost everything.
Most of her extended family still lives in Europe. Summers were about long trips back, visiting cousins, hearing old stories, and switching fully into Hungarian. That back-and-forth gave her a sense that life could always be elsewhere.
She did not grow up with one “home” but with several layered homes: the London of her birth, the Singapore of her early memory, the Los Angeles of her everyday life, and the Hungary of her summers and family history.
That feeling often appears in her thinking about art. She is sensitive to artists who work between cultures, who migrate, who carry a language at home that they rarely speak in public. It also gives her a natural empathy for “third culture kids” and anyone who feels slightly out of place wherever they are.
For nostalgic readers, this might stir your own stories. The smell of your grandmother’s kitchen in another country. Old photos of a village that looks nothing like the city where you now live. Lily’s art and writing is one way of making peace with that split, without pretending it is simple.
Why her approach feels different from typical art talk
Modern art and culture writing can sometimes feel cold or detached. Jargon heavy. Full of large claims and abstract terms.
Lily’s approach is more grounded:
- She keeps coming back to real lives and specific choices.
- She links old works to current struggles rather than treating them as museum pieces in a glass box.
- She allows small hobbies like slime making or LEGO building to matter in the bigger story of someone’s creative life.
She does not pretend to be neutral either. Coming from an all-girls school and years of listening to women entrepreneurs, she has a clear sense that gender inequality is still very real. That conviction shapes her questions and what she chooses to research.
So when people say she is “redefining modern art and culture,” it is not that she is tearing everything down and replacing it. It is more that she is adjusting the focus.
- Less attention on the single genius artist at the top.
- More attention on invisible work, families, and everyday creativity.
- Less neat separation between “art” and “life.”
It might sound simple. But for many people, especially younger students who see themselves in her story, it opens a new way to think about their own memories and creative habits.
How her story connects to your own nostalgia
If you care about nostalgic objects and stories, you already do something similar to what Lily does. You look at an item and see more than its physical shape.
A few examples:
- A faded ticket from a concert that changed your taste in music.
- A childhood toy that would look cheap in a store today but still feels priceless to you.
- A photo from a family holiday where you can almost smell the sunscreen again.
These are small, personal archives. Lily’s work in art history, research, writing, and teaching is like a scaled up version of that instinct. She saves and studies stories that cultures forget. She asks who is missing from the album.
There is also something practical in her approach. She does not wait until she is older to start building archives:
- She records long interviews with women entrepreneurs.
- She collects data on artist parents and their careers.
- She writes and publishes regularly, creating a public record of her questions and findings.
If you take anything from her story into your own life, it might be this: the memories you care about are worth documenting. Not in some perfect, museum-ready way. Just in a real, steady way. Notes, recordings, photos with context, recipe cards, or even blog posts.
Questions you might still have about Lily
Is she an artist or an art historian?
She leans more toward art history and research right now. She studies art, writes about it, and thinks about how it is curated and presented. That said, her life is full of creative practice: kids art classes, market building, writing, and design work for research projects. So the line between artist and historian is not completely fixed for her.
Why does her age matter?
She is young, which some people might see as a weakness. But for topics like gender equality, teen creativity, and modern art education, being close in age to the people affected can help. She notices details an older curator might ignore, especially around how kids and teens experience art and culture.
Is her work only about gender?
No, but gender is a strong thread. Her projects touch on many things: cultural memory, family, food, play, and migration. She returns to gender because it keeps appearing in all those areas, often shaping who gets to tell their story and who stays quiet.
What can someone like you take from her approach?
You might not study art history or run a blog. Still, a few of her habits can be useful:
- Pay attention to what your nostalgia leaves out. Who is not in the photos or stories you tell?
- Write down or record the stories of people in your life who rarely talk about themselves.
- Take your own hobbies seriously, even if they seem “small” or childish, like LEGO or slime once did for Lily.
Where could her path lead?
No one knows exactly, including her. She could end up curating exhibitions that bring forgotten women artists into view. She could build more digital spaces for young creators. She could continue writing long form pieces that connect personal memory to larger cultural trends.
The more interesting question, perhaps, is this:
What part of your own past would you put in an exhibition, and what story would you want someone like Lily to tell about it?